Animated illustrators crank out comic strip in 24 hours at URI event

About two dozen cartoonists participate in the event held for the first time at the university on Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Mark Reynolds Journal Staff Writer mrkrynlds

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — Ana Burleson relishes the chance to dream up characters like "Fiona" — a girl with big eyes and shiny golden locks.

“I make up characters,” says the 11-year-old sixth grader from Seekonk. “I always have for a very long time.”

But about a year ago, Burleson began to express her imaginary characters in the form of cartoons. And on Sunday, she and Fiona celebrated “24-hour Comics Day” with other cartoonists on the campus of the University of Rhode Island.

Comics Day is a long-established, widely celebrated event in which cartoonists try to crank out a full-blown 24-page comic strip within 24 hours.

For example, in 2008, 32-year-old Aya Rothwell and other cartoonists found themselves working in a Boston store, Hub Comics, at 3 a.m. Some crime-watchers took notice and peppered them with questions, she recalls.

Questions such as: What are you doing? What suspicious activity is going on there?

The police sent them home, she says.

Rothwell, now a grad student pursuing conservation biology, had her comic strip from that event with her Sunday as she socialized with other doodlers in an art room at the university’s Fine Arts Center.

The strip tells the story of some cute animals who are trying to flee some predators. They are mean-looking wolf-like fiends wearing white lab-coats.

They are dentists. When Rothwell drew up the cartoon, she had just visited the dentist’s office for the first time after skipping regular visits over an 18-month period.

It had been an anxious time before she learned her mouth had made it through okay.

She says her anxieties lingered and influenced her comic strip, set in a world with nothing to eat but sugar and salt. As a result, no one has any teeth left.

“This is 24-hour cartoon comics logic okay?” she says.

Rothwell was among about two dozen cartoonists to participate in the event held for the first time at the university on Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., said an adjunct professor, Krzysztof Mathews.

Late Sunday afternoon, Burleson and her sister, Elizabeth, finished up cartoons that they had been working on over a four-hour period.

Elizabeth’s cartoon is folded into a little booklet. Ana’s two-page strip tells the story of Fiona’s friend, Isla. Isla thinks it would be fun to buy a candy bar with a fraudulent dollar bill that she has forged, but Fiona frowns on it.